A Russian immigrant's warning of U.S. weakness

philebersole

Dec 2

DISINTEGRATION: Indications of the Coming American Collapse by Andrei Martyanov (2021)

Andrei Martyanov, an immigrant from Russia, is a writer and blogger on military affairs who for years has been warning the citizens of his adopted country of American military weakness.

In Disintegration, his latest book, he connects U.S. military failures to an an overall decline in American society, economically, politically and morally, which he fears may be irreversible.

Born in 1963 in Baku, he is a graduate of the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy and served as an officer in Soviet Coast Guard through 1990. He moved to the United States in the mid-1990s and worked for a time as laboratory director for a military aerospace group. He lives in Washington state.

He said that as he traveled in the early 1990s, he always felt relief at landing in the USA, a safe haven from crime-ridden Russia. He would stop at an airport bar and enjoy a plate of chicken wings, a beer and a cigarette. The sitcom Cheers was usually on TV, and, to him, it symbolized the values of a peaceful, welcoming nation.

Since then, he says, his new country has been in decline, and his old country has risen from the ashes. The United States is attempting to project power worldwide that it no longer has.

I won't attempt to summarize the book, but I'll hit a few high points.

He presents evidence that, even though the United States has the world's most expensive military, its military technology is qualitatively inferior to Russia's and China's.

Russia's hypersonic missiles have changed warfare forever, he said. They are not interruptible by existing U.S. anti-missile systems. He said the U.S. lag behind Russias in air-defense systems is massive. None of this can be changed anytime soon.

Although U.S. power projection defends on its Navy and Air Force, its shipbuilding and aircraft industries lag behind Chinese competitors and are being overtaken by Russians.

In 2018, 90 percent of the world's ships were built in China, Japan and South Korea. Russia also surpasses the USA in commercial shipbuilding. Many tankers and other commercial ships built by these four countries are bigger than U.S. aircraft carriers.

Boeing aircraft have had disastrous crashes in the past few years, due to failures in the manufacturing process. Martyanov says Russia's new MC-21 plane is competitive with Boeing or any other of the world's aircraft.

The U.S. responded to the MC-21 by blocking exports of carbon fiber, a necessary component. Russia proceeded to develop its own carbon fiber industry.